OK, I give. Here are a set of internal coding guidelines
We had a great chat today following up from the Designing .NET Class Libraries session on Naming Conventions. I believe we did get a transcript of that chat that will be posted soon. One of the things that was asked in one way or another about 50 times was around a style guide for implementation details of your frameworks. I have thus far resisted going there as I have found the religious wars not worth the cost as my core goal is to ensure a consistent 3rd party developer experience, so stuff like bracing style and tabs vs spaces don’t mater.
That said, I was convinced during the chat that there is value in offering a standard set of guidelines for folks to reference. I post them here in the hopes that it saves your development team time… Hopefully by using these guidelines as tie breaker you will have fewer arguments internally and get more real work done.
But before the flames start, I want to be clear; these are NOT iron-clad guidelines that everyone at MS follows… In that sense they do carry less weight than the other design guidelines I talk about here regularly. Also, I am sure there are some suggestions to making them better, cleaner. I will entertain those in the spirit of improving the doc, but my first priority is still the public surface area…
Enjoy.